Facebook Modifies Its Public App Metrics Reporting

January 10, 2013

Facebook may not be at CES, but the social network is busy readying its own announcement for next week. We don’t know what the company will be announcing, but it has one announcement this week to tide you over.

In its weekly platform update, Facebook announced that it is changing how its API reports public app usage metrics. For the longest time, the reported metrics was just a number showing how many monthly active users any particular app had. There was no way to actually rank apps without looking through all the metrics available, or using a third party service like AppData. That’s all changing next week.

Starting January 16, Facebook will move to reporting app usage by overall rank and active user thresholds. For example, the social network says that an app with 1.1 million MAU will now be reported as having more than 1 million users as well as being the #300 largest app. Facebook says the new metrics reporting will “provide a more consistent view of the ecosystem and highlight successful apps earlier in the lifecycle.”

Developers need not worry about the change as the new metrics are for general reporting use only. It won’t impact the actual number of users any particular app has, and developers can still see the exact number of users their apps have in App Insights. With that being said, developers should be aware that Facebook will be adding “daily_active_users_rank” and “monthly_active_users_rank” to the application object via the Graph API and FQL to provide access to the new ranking API.

As usual, the weekly announcements are closed out with a bug report. In the past week, Facebook received 202 bug reports with 111 bugs being accepted for further review. The social network also fixed 51 bugs. You can see the full list by hitting up the blog post.